First thing to get organized: get house shoes!
Photo (c) Wishfoot88 CC BY 3.0
"So, here we are then my little Ausländer. Your first day as an aspiring German. You’ll have woken up in your bed, probably because it’s gotten light outside and you don’t have curtains, because curtains are evil and suggest you have something to hide.
Now, you’ll need to carefully make up your half of the bed (you should be sleeping in a double bed made up of two single mattresses and two single duvets). What it lacks in nocturnal romance, it more than makes up for in practicality, the most prized of German possessions.
Now, careful! Don’t step off of the Bettvorleger yet, there is a very high chance that the floors will be ever so slightly colder than you expect! So cold you may go into some kind of morning shock. That’s why you need house shoes! They are requirements of Germanism.
I would like to be able to tell you why Germans are so in love with their house shoes, I’ve asked several but still have no definitive answer. Not because they’ve not told me, but because the answer is so incredibly unromantic, so sensible, practical and boring that my happy little barefoot brain has no idea where to store information of that nature and so just gives up committing it to memory."
This is so much true, that you should actually ask for house shoes when visiting German friends in their home. Accept their offer if they ask you if you'd like to put on a pair of their house shoes. They have some spare ones. Brought along from the last hotel stay in Egypt or Turkey, or some ugly remnants of a phase in life (usually adolescence) in the form of those as visualized on the photo. The design of your house shoe can be slightly less fancy than your personality, however, be careful when inviting someone to your home, you will be judged by the house shoes you are wearing. If you want to be cool you buy a pair of sneakers just to wear indoors (and you wear them open, don't get the idea to use the laces. That's for male house shoes. Female house shoes should be replaced with so-called "Rutschesocken". Ideally of the brand "Falke". You will feel like a toddler, but so be it.
I admit, I wear them, too. And I don't even wear "Rutschesocken" because they look so...sportive (to say it friendly). I have been given "Pampuschen" a brand that sells kinda "elegant" house shoes. If they ever can be called elegant. But anyway, I suffer cold feet and i don't have floor heating, so I wear them. Aaah, well, I am probably German.
